


you'd better cut him up, girl

by Rabbitt



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Multi, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:55:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/858038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbitt/pseuds/Rabbitt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you feel as though your colleagues underestimate you, because you are a woman?”</p><p> </p><p>“Do you?” Willow shoots back.</p><p> </p><p>Lecter smiles: incisors, canines, molars. Too many teeth, like a dog.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh,” she says pleasantly. “every day.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	you'd better cut him up, girl

**Author's Note:**

> Set prior to "Trou Normand". Title from the Decemberist's "Culling of the Fold".

 

“Do you feel as though your colleagues underestimate you, because you are a woman?”

“Do you?” Willow shoots back.

Lecter smiles: incisors, canines, molars. Too many teeth, like a dog.

“Oh,” she says pleasantly. “every day.”

 

* * *

 

She has never known how to make them see this: Willow Graham is not her tits. She is not her legs, though when she walks by men and they think, Jesus, the thing’s I’d do to her, she knows exactly what it is they would do. She knows how uncomfortable Zeller’s collars become against the hollow of his throat every time she leans over an autopsy table, but she is not her ass or her hips. She is not her slim hands or her lips, she is not her tongue. Willow is not her eyelashes or her throat or her pussy. She is not her broken bones. She cannot figure out how to make them see this is all a carapace, Trojan horses. She knows of no other way to say the truth: Willow Graham is not a body. 

Willow Graham is a brain. And sometimes? Not even her own.

 

* * *

 

She has no idea what Annabelle is. 

 

* * *

 

“Be quiet now,” Will says to Rita, as the pendulum swings out. She crouches down next to her, listens to her heart rabbiting. Runs a finger down her jaw, to the ropes. “Sweet thing.”

She twines her hands under the ropes at Rita’s throat, drags her across the carpet. She hauls her onto the motel bed, like a fish with the rope strung through its gills. Looks at her lying on the scratchy blue bedspread. Straddles her stomach.

_Shhhsh. Shsh._

There’s a line of rope wedged on Rita’s tongue, prying her cheeks into a Glasgow smile. But it’s a slummy motel with deadbolts on the doors and a little placard by the chain saying _management not responsible_ , off the highway in South Carolina, and even if anyone heard her screaming, no one would come.

_This is her design._

She rips at Rita’s clothes with her bare hands, buttons clattering against the headboard, the nightstand. Tears at her skirt with her teeth. She leaves the fabric rucked up against the ropes. Her hands keep catching on Rita’s angles: pelvis, elbows, knees. She unbuckles her belt. Her arms are twisted flat against her back. _No._ Shoulders dislocated. _No._ She cries against the rough rope in her mouth. She’s bound too tightly to fight, shoulders burning. She can’t feel her fingertips, her toes. _No._ He slides a hand down her thigh. She slides a hand down her thigh. Some sound dies in her throat. _No, no -_

 _Will? Willow?_ “Will!”

Will’s eyes snap open. She blinks. Rita Desjardin’s empty eyes stare back at her. Someone’s hands are wrapped around her wrists. She turns her head. Beverly stares back at her, holding her.

“Are you okay?”

Jesus, Zee says, from somewhere very far away from behind her. She cannot see his lip curl as he looks at her, slumped against the bed where Rita Desjardin’s body lay rotting, but she feels her own mouth sneer. Will knows the words, even though his tongue never flickers against his teeth: _crazy bitch._ Sees: Beverly slide smoothly sideways, covering her body with her body.

Like she is protecting Willow from a bomb blast.

Like Willow is a live grenade.

 

* * *

 

The first time she meets Dr. Lecter, the psychiatrist is wearing what Will guesses is an awful lot of make-up expertly applied to look like very little make-up, towering high heels the colour of an excellent claret and a sleeveless sheath dress that clings like it’s wet.

 _She must make a killing,_ is the first thing Will thinks as Lecter takes her hand in hers, grip firm and dry.

“Annabelle Lecter,” she almost misses. “A pleasure to meet you, Willow.”

“Just Will is fine.”

Lecter smiles; no teeth. She has nice legs put to good use in a pair of sheer stockings - proper stockings, thigh-highs, Will guesses - and when Lecter sits in one of Jack’s chairs, crossing one leg over the other in an economical movement, she thinks she can see the line of a garter. She crosses her own legs, one over the other.

“Dr. Lecter came very highly recommended to me by Alana Bloom, Will,” Jack says, gesturing at the woman with one hand. “I’ve asked her to help us assemble our psychological profile. I’m sure you two will get along.”

Lecter smiles very prettily, folds her red nails in her lap.

“Like a house on fire,” Willow says.

 

* * *

 

“Everything we are made of,” Dr. Lecter says. She presses her face in the angle of Willow’s neck, breathes in through her nose. Keeps her surgeon’s hands folded behind her back. “Was taken.”

 

* * *

 

“Get out,” Beverly says. Her hair smells like almonds. “I swear, Zeller, now. Everybody out.”

Will hears footsteps, doors slamming, the soft snuffling of a stag. Breathes in Beverly’s hair. Hands on her pulse points. Their arms folded in prayer between their two chests.

“I’m gonna need some kind of verbal answer, next time I ask you if you’re okay, Will,” Beverly says but doesn’t ask the question, holds her. Will breathes and breathes. She feels her shoulders dislocate, once, slide back into their sockets. She does not twist Beverly’s hair into a hitch knot around her knuckles.

“I’m okay,” she says, before Beverly can ask again. “I’m fine.”

Beverly pulls back. She lets go of Will’s wrists and says, “Well you’re good enough to lie, at least.”

Will pulls her glasses off and rubs the lenses with the hem of her shirt. She hears the door open, Jack’s purposeful footsteps.

“Will?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” she echoes.

“Jimmy says you were screaming,” Jack says.

“I know, I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m okay. Just a little too deep.” She can feel Beverly watching her, printing on her skin like sunlight through a clean window.

Jack feeds out a measured silence.

“In whose head?” he finally asks. “Zeller says you were screaming, too. Screaming, _please, god, don’t hurt me_.”

Will stands up, forcing Beverly to scramble back on her hands.

“In whose head do you think, Jack?” she says, looking at the greying carpet. “Everyone’s.”

She pushes past him to the door.

 

* * *

 

“Jack Crawford has repeatedly forced you into intimate interactions that you made clear you did not want and actively avoided.” 

“You make it sound so, so sordid,” Will says, mouth open.

“You are not public property, Willow,” Annabelle says, and Will watches her fingers curl inward, as if clutching something. Scalpels, Will thinks. There is light coming in through the draperies, thick as gauze. It plays across Annabelle’s cheekbones, does strange things to her shadows. Her face isn’t quite composed of angles, but steep parabolas, distributions without outliers. Her brows and chin are sharp, her nose thin and pointed - most women would probably have considered a nose job once or twice, but she doesn’t think Lecter ever has. She probably takes great photos. Will grips the arms of her chair tightly, knuckles serrated.

“I don’t, I don’t say no.”

“And Jack should know better than to think its absence means yes.”

“I don’t really mind,” Will says. Thinks of hands on her shoulders, hands on her back, brushing hair from her face as she sits dazedly, half-dreaming, at desks papered in photos of corpses. Being pulled by her wrists from room to room. “Jack shows affection tactilely. It doesn’t make the nature of his attention inappropriate.”

“Do you imagine it is fatherly affection, then, that he feels towards you?” Annabelle asks. She tilts her head, fixes Willow with her scavenger gaze. Looks at her like she wants to open Willow like an unstitched wound. “Have you been inside his head? Is that what you have seen?”

“I try not to get my empathy all over my colleagues, Dr. Lecter,” she says stiffly.

“But you can’t turn it off,” Annabelle says. “So what is he? Your colleague? Your father substitute? Do you think he is your _friend_ , Willow?”

Willow stands, hands curled in nautili of fists at her sides. “I think I’ll call our meeting to a close, Doctor,” she says, teeth clicking on the end of each word.

She can hear the machinery of her own body: blood pumping, heart pounding. She can’t hear the birds or the purring of traffic out the window. When she steps into Lecter’s office it is like stepping through a mirror.

“Forgive me, Willow,” Lecter says quietly. “I am only trying to ensure you have clear appraisal of your relationships.”

“He cares about me,” Will says, trembling.

“Of course,” Annabelle soothes. “But he’s not the only one.”

 

* * *

 

“Dear heart,” Annabelle says, and it is said to her, not to the real, bloody, pulsing heart in Annabelle’s palm that she has pulled from her own cloven chest. “dear heart, I am going to feed this to you someday, and afterward, you’ll lick between my fingers to make sure you’ve gotten every single drop. And oh, Willow girl, how sweet you’re going to think it tastes.”

 

* * *

 

Outside the Florence motel, the clusters of techs and leos glance at her, muttering. She doesn’t look at them. Blinks in the bright grey afternoon. Beverly materialises somewhere at her shoulder.

“C’mon,” she says, and Will lets her half-drag her to a mud-caked rental car. The frost has thawed enough in Florence to turn all the backroads to sludge. Beverly opens the passenger door for her, guides her into it like an arrest.

She can smell her almond shampoo again as she leans across her to the glovebox. This close, Beverly fills up her personal space to its edges. She thinks of how simple it would be to slam her head into the dashboard until her skull caved, pull her head into her lap like a child.

“Drink this,” Beverly says, handing her something. Will gulps it, head tilted back, expecting water. Whiskey. She blinks at the steel flask.

“You keep alcohol in the car?”

“I keep it in my first aid kit. I don’t stitch and drive, either,” Beverly says. Will watches her in the rear-view mirror. She drags a thumbnail through the cursive engraving.

“I was hoping the taste would help shock you out of it,” Beverly continues, grinning. “But you took that like water.”

Will shrugs one shoulder, screws the cap back on the flask. “I spent three months inside Ted Bundy’s head for a research paper my sophomore year. I learned to handle my liquor.” She hands it back to Beverly. “Thanks.”

Beverly takes it, letting her fingers brush against Will’s, firebrands of contact.

“I told you,” she says, shrugging. “I’m there for you, Will.”

“I’m not sure you know what exactly that entails,” Will huffs out a laugh. She listens to the hooves crunch across the gravel outside the car. “Otherwise you wouldn’t sign yourself up so quickly.”

“If you’d tell me,” Beverly begins, gently. She cuts herself off. “I won’t ask. But if you do, I’ll still be there.”

They sit in silence, the police offers stringing yellow tape like streamers across the parking lot around them, clouds rolling over the sun, for a long time.

 

* * *

  

“Beverly thinks the Ripper is a woman,” Will says.

Annabelle swirls her Pinot and doesn’t look at Will. It is a trap, Will knows: Annabelle does not look at Will so Will will look at her. Or maybe it is a politeness. Either way, Will always falls for it.

“It would almost be better if she didn’t,” Will continues, watching the red eddies dictated by Annabelle’s hand. She never wears any jewelry on her hands, and Will finds herself watching her deft, naked fingers whenever they move.

Annabelle sniffs her wine and nods. “The trouble for any minority: they will always be seen as both representative of and the result of whatever sets them apart from the majority. Now they will think you have come to this conclusion because you are both women, not because you are both investigators.”

“Yes,” Will says. “And perhaps we have. Maybe that’s why we can see it and they can’t.”

Annabelle takes a sip, runs her pink tongue, cat-like, over her teeth. “Men always like to forget how familiar we are with blood.”

 

* * *

 

“I’m worried about you,” Alana says. 

Will frowns, looking up from a close-up of the white rope braided around Lila Crane’s knees. “You’re always worried about me.”

Alana nods, lowering herself into the seat next to Will. She picks up a photo of Lila’s blackened hands, puts it down. “Yes,” she agrees. “It would be thoughtful of you to allow me a little peace of mind, now and again.”

“I am very thoughtful,” Will argues.

“ _Thoughtful_ and _full of thoughts_ do not mean the same thing,” Alana says. She laughs, a noise in the sterile FBI conference room that crinkles like unwrapping candy in a theater. “Do you remember, when we were first acquainted? I was trying to get you to warm up to me.”

She does not say, _because you had no one_. Willow knows this: she is the only one of them who rescues _dogs_.

“I told you that professional women sometimes viewed one another as threats,” Alana continues. She is very careful where she puts her hands on the stainless steel table, does not touch the bodies. “Lousy conversation starter. I was trying to reassure you I wasn’t one. I thought it best to be blunt with you, then: you’ve never appreciated a scalpel. I asked you if you thought of me as a threat. Do you remember what you said?”

_No, Dr. Bloom. I hadn’t thought of you at all._

“Well,” Will says. She looks up from the rope laced down Amy Peterson’s back, looks at Alana’s lips, the hollows of her cheeks, temples. “Now I think of you all the time.”

 

* * *

 

She wanders out across the rough sand when she is young, to where the tide has stained it dark and then receded. Further, and white foam licks at her feet. She is collecting things she does not have room to keep: broken sanddollars, blue mussels with oil slick hearts, shards of glass worn smooth and soft. She walks to where the tide pools around her ankles, her knees, the water night-blue. Further, her toes sinking in the mud, and further, the water tonguing the rolled-up cuffs of her shorts. When the current catches her, she breathes in a deep mouthful of bitter water as she goes under. The saltwater stings at her eyes. She thrashes her arms furiously, but can’t tell what direction the milky light is coming from, drives herself deeper below. She breathes again. She breathes again. She floats, weightless, for what feels like an age before strong arms wrap around her and pull her out. When he drags them to the sand, her father holds her small body against his for a long time.

 _Don’t you understand_ , he asks her. _Didn’t I tell you._

 

* * *

 

Will is in Dr. Lecter’s waiting room. Waiting, as it were. She has the soles of her shoes pressed flatly to the ground and above them, parallel, the palms of her hands pressed flatly to her knees. She is very careful not to fidget. _Prey animal,_ she thinks.

The door to Lecter’s office swings outward.

“Willow,” Lecter says, voice roughened. The blood on her chin is the exact shade of her lipstick. “Willow, please.”

She stumbles forward, one hand rotating downward on the doorknob like a gear as she falls. The other presses to her chest, trying to keep the slick coiled things falling out of her from falling out. She has been opened, cloven cleanly down the middle, layers of skin and muscle sliced and pinned back, chest needled to shoulders. Will can see the sharp edges of her severed ribs where her sternum has been neatly removed. Blood pools down from the bottom of the wound, across her stomach, her groin, her thighs, her shoes. She watches the fragile, stretched meat of Lecter’s lungs billowing outward, the organs she cannot name beneath the blood fluttering like wounded birds. Her heart is missing.

The door to Lecter’s office swings outward.

“Willow,” Lecter says. “Please. Come in.”

Will follows her inside.

Annabelle is wearing a pleated champagne taffeta dress and five-inch crocodile skin pumps: too impractical for anything other than sitting and slinking at a glance, but Will has been trying to stop being surprised by how quickly Lecter can move in her outfits of choice. The soft, lacy fabrics Lecter likes to drape herself in do little to disguise the lithe runner’s muscles beneath them. Will cannot imagine Lecter on a treadmill, yoga pants. Still. Everyone has to have hobbies.

 _Imitation_ , she murmurs, circling a thumb over on crocodile-skin heel when she catches Will staring. _The poor devils_.

“This case,” Annabelle begins. “The Birmingham Binder... forgive me,” she says, seeing Will’s grimace, “but despite their inclination towards the obscene, the tabloid names do tend to lend a certain clarity.”

“Only one of the bodies was even found in Birmingham,” Will says. Helen Holloway, minor celebrity and local newscaster, found in one of the booths of a vacant diner. On the table, not the seat. Enough of her former co-workers had seized upon the name to make it stick, even while the Binder crawled steadily up the east coast.

“Nevertheless, Jack tells me he thinks you are having some trouble with this one.”

“Of course he does,” Will snaps.

Felix, the english shepherd, still snarls when she is spooked. Will tests out the feeling of her fingernails in her palms. Annabelle raises an eyebrow. “Too often Jack Crawford has been guilty of neglect. Why do you balk at his concern, now that he shows it?”

Will grinds her teeth and feels childish. “You and Alana,” she starts slowly. “have taken issue with what you see as Jack’s abuse of my empathy.”

“Dr. Bloom and I,” Lecter reflects, and Will can see her feel out the edges of the words in her mouth, tongue out their implications. “but not yourself, then?”

“Regardless,” Will says quickly. “Jack isn’t showing concern for my empathic abilities this time. He’s worried about my, my _womanhood_.”

“Ah,” Annabelle says. Will follows the curve of her calf as it slides up her shin, legs crossing. No stockings today. “The victims. Young, beautiful, intelligent women, not unlike yourself, correct?”

Will can feel the blush bloom on her cheeks, blinks rapidly. She thinks of Lila Crane’s perfect, even teeth, her long legs rotted from the knees down.

“Perhaps this is our Jack showing concern for your empathy, then. Do you think his worry is that you are exploring the heads of the victims, instead of the killer?” Annabelle pauses. “Are you?”

“I’m in his head plenty.”

“But you have been in the victims’ minds. Have found yourself empathising with them. Their last moments.” It is not a question. At the first crime scene, she had lowered herself into the water tank where they found Judith Myers and felt the sickness seeping through her body, had lost all feeling in her fingers, her wrists, her forearms, her shoulders.

“If I have,” Will says. “It’s not anything new. I can’t - I can’t turn it off. Usually, the killer is just...”

“Stronger?” Annabelle suggests. Will nods.

“But I still get flashes. I still -” years of murders: water in her nose, water in her lungs, blood sticky on her thighs, hands pressed flat against her teeth, her ulna snapping, her heart cut out, iron to brain, her mouth full of fire, tendons unravelling from her muscles “- I still feel it, sometimes. What they feel.”

Annabelle tilts her head to the side. _Prey animal,_ Will thinks again, rubs a hand down her jeans.

“You have had more than your fair share of dying, haven’t you, Willow?” Annabelle asks softly. “More than the rest of us.”

“The dying is nothing,” Will says. “Against the killing.”

Annabelle’s eyes flicker to Will’s hands, as if she knows how long Will has spent twisting an invisible rope around her hands, palms flipping to knuckles, knuckles to palms. “Which was it that you felt when you looked at the Binder’s crime scenes?”

“Both.”

“Is it more than just flashes, this time?” Annabelle asks. “What you are seeing of the victims’ last moments on earth. It is more than just the taste of fear in their mouths, isn’t it?”

The pendulum swings, and she ties them up, makes enough space to fit herself inside of them, and afterward, leaves them tied. The pendulum swings, and she can number exactly what he has taken from her to make himself fit. The pendulum swings, and she has been tied for hours, for days. The pendulum swings, and she can feel her body fall apart around her.

“Is it personal, perhaps?” Annabelle asks. “Not, as Jack Crawford may think, because they are women and so are you. The ropes, then?”

Will pulls her lip into her mouth, watches Annabelle track the movement.

“There was a man,” Will says, and Annabelle nods, unsurprised. “My undergrad. He liked to tie women up. Me,” she amends. “He liked to tie me up.”

“And did you?” Annabelle asks. “Like to be tied.”

Will shakes her head, like water in her ears. “It doesn’t matter.” Annabelle does not protest here, and Will rushes on. “He liked it. And when he did it, I could feel... overheady.”

She works her tongue between her teeth. “I didn’t just analytically understand his power-trip or sexual satisfaction, I experienced it with him. Could lie beneath him and be on top of myself at the same time. I couldn’t - I couldn’t even worry about him binding me or be concerned with the risks because I was caught up in his excitement, his, his desire.” She can feel the expression twist wrongly on her lips, can’t fix it. “It didn’t matter if I liked it. I wasn’t getting off on being tied up. I was getting off on doing the tying.”

She presses the heel of one hand sharply into the edge of her eye socket, doesn’t let the pendulum swing back. The benefit of her investigations: she has little time to dream of this petty indignity, does not often think of the tightness in the throat that is not her throat, the sweatiness of someone else’s palms as they tie up some - slut - girl - herself - doesn’t think of taking or breaking in this particular matter. (It is not, as everything, a fair trade.) She thinks of it now, regardless: the heat of his knees pressed between her knees, his body weight lying fully on her ribcage, compressing her lungs, his hands on her throat. Thinks of her hands wrapping around a throat, thumbnails digging into the hollow of a collarbone. Thinks of bruises on her collarbone, ropeburn on her wrists. Thinks of whispering _oh you sweet dirty whore_ , the echo as she hears it aloud. Thinks of unwrapping a shuddering body, like a gift, of lying naked beneath someone.

“I never said no,” Will says into her wrist. “you understand. I saw myself through his eyes. I saw myself as furniture.”

She hears Annabelle move without looking up, the rustle of taffeta against leather, the tap of hooves on carpet. She pauses when she is close enough that Will can smell the notes of her perfume: honey and myrrh, and Will listens to her measured breaths. Annabelle carefully wraps her fingers around Will’s, scrapes her lacquered nails against Will’s lifeline, peels her hand away from her face. Will blinks a few times, looks down at Annabelle’s knees where she is crouched before her seat.

“If you ask me how that made me feel,” Will says. “I will be very disappointed.”

She looks up, meeting Annabelle’s cheekbones in time to see her smile.

“I would so hate to disappoint you, Willow,” Annabelle murmurs. Her hand slips to Will’s wrist, curls around it, and Will can feel her own pulse thumping against it. She holds on steadily, doesn’t squeeze.

Doesn’t let go.

In her head, Will only hears her own thoughts.

 

* * *

 

 _Don’t you understand_ , her father says, gasping into her wet hair. _Didn’t I tell you._

_Be careful, Willow girl. It’s so terribly easy to drown._

 

* * *

 

They’ve set up labyrinth walls of corkboards in one of the conference rooms. Will stands in front of one of them, a neat row of six smiling faces looking down on her: Judith Myers, Lila Crane, Helen Holloway, Nancy Thompson, Amy Peterson, Rita Desjardin. Aberdeen, Bessemer, Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, Florence. 

Subjects, she thinks. Six faces smiling down at her: driver’s licenses, employee ids, portraits. She is thinking of the things that made the people, how they were protagonists in their own lives before the Binder came along.

He hadn’t been, she knows. The Binder wasn’t interested in these six women as people.

Will turns around, look at the board behind her. Six corpses, strung up with white rope in sailing knots strung so tightly it cut off their circulation. Six delicately arranged bodies, limbs atrophied, taken with a crime scene photographer’s lens the same way it had taken in bootprints and crumpled bedsheets and a half-eaten apple. She looks at the contrast of white rope and bruised skin, the strokes of spines, quotations of ribs, swollen feet.

Objects, Will thinks. Not women, not people. Corpses. Victims. Tools. Toys.

“Will?” Jack’s voice says softly. Will starts; he is standing close to her and she had not heard him approach. She doesn’t turn to see him but she knows that Jack always looks at her face when he talks to her. “Do you have something for us?”

Subject, object, Will thinks.

 

* * *

 

She does not like to visit Abigail alone. Does not want to look at her covered throat, think of Annabelle’s hands sheathed around it. Does not want her to look at Will’s face and see her own blood, look at Will’s hands and see a gun. 

 _Are you feeling maternal?_ Annabelle had asked her. She thinks of Abigail, born as all things, in blood.

She goes anyway.

She walks through the greenhouse with Abigail, pale light filtering through the glass. The air is thick and damp. She keeps thinking of the things that make them people, their loves. She feels like a praying mantis, keeps thinking _sexual cannibalism._

“I keep having bad dreams,” Abigail says. “With you in them.”

“Is this one of them?” Will asks.

“No,” Abigail says. She smiles very sadly, touches a rose petal with a shaking hand. Will watches, expects the rose to wilt and blacken beneath Abigail’s fingertips. But it just bobs softly, heavy on its stem. “I think it’s one of yours.”

 

* * *

 

Jack reaches for her glasses, his broad hand moving quickly towards her face, and she holds very still.

“Dr. Lecter thinks I should tell you not to touch me,” she says as he pushes them up her nose, breath against his wrist.

His eyes are the dark, wet brown of freshly turned soil. She looks away.

“I thought Dr. Lecter was going to help you become more sociable,” he says slowly, pulling his arm back. He folds his hands behind his back, keeps them there, shifted back by an inch.

“I think she wants me to recognise the parts of myself you aren’t supposed to have,” Will says.

Jack blinks.

Will smiles. “I guess she thinks I’m not sure what those are. Or you aren’t.”

“I’ve never asked you for more than I thought you could give, Will.”

“I know,” she nods. “I do wonder, sometimes, at how much you think I have to spare.”

 

* * *

 

Lecter is painting on lipstick with delicate strokes, oxblood red. She puckers, her mouth a heart. 

Will flicks through sheets of Annabelle’s drawings: the skeleton, divided joint by joint, the warp and weft of muscle, lacings of veins. She likes how Lecter labels the unwanted body parts with prettied names - _axilla, hallux_ \- and tells her this.

Lecter presses her fingertips to the ribs beneath Will’s out-stretched arm, where she holds a graphite nervous system in her hand.

“I cannot imagine,” she says. “that there is any part of you someone would not want to have.”

 

* * *

 

Alana takes her for coffee, dragging her out of her empty classroom into the painfully bright day. She perches on a high stool while Alana waits in line for lattes, pinches the bridge of her nose under her glasses. The couple seated behind her are fighting in tight whispers, and Will keeps feeling her jaw clench.

“Are you okay?” Alana asks, handing her a hot paper cup. “You look upset.”

She shrugs one shoulder, taking a sip of coffee even though it’s burning her hand through the thin cup.

Alana makes smalltalk, brings up her niece’s new puppy, stories of her father taking her and her brothers out fishing, the last concert she went to, a year ago. Will listens. Listens to the cadence of Alana's voice, listens to the muted anger of the couple behind them give way softly to the noise a hunting dog makes when it can no longer run: a low, tremulous whine.

“Jack thinks I’m too close to the victims in the Binder case,” Will says.

Alana taps a finger against her plastic coffee lid. “I’ll admit that was never a concern of mine. But I suppose he sees your vulnerability differently.”

Will rests her fingers on top of her coffee lid. “Do you know how many killers the FBI has asked me to profile for them?” She doesn’t wait for Alana to answer. “I know every one of them.” She doesn’t say, _I know exactly how they had to press their fists in their mouths to keep from laughing, I know exactly how blood tastes to them, I know exactly how it felt when they scrubbed their hands afterwards._ She says, “I know all of their names. I can remember how they killed people and what their body count was.”

Alana waits, ankles crossed on the bottom rung of the stool. She is sitting with her back to the window, daylight a halo in her dark hair.

“But those people? The ones they killed? I can’t even remember their names,” Will says. “Yesterday, I had a dream about Karl Lohman. He beat sixteen girls to death with a claw hammer. I tried to remember, the last girl we found: was she a redhead, or a blonde? Did she play the violin or the cello? Or was that another girl, another victim, another case?”

“Does it matter?” Alana asks her. She asks her like a therapist: like she already knows what the right answer is, but she wants to hear Will say it for herself. “Who the girls are before they die?”

“It should!” Will does not feel her palm hit the table but she sees her and Alana’s cups rattle. She laughs. “Jack doesn’t have to worry about me identifying with the victims. As far as anyone can tell, they don’t have identities. They’re just victims. It doesn’t matter who they were; all that matters is what was done to them.”

Subject, object.

She sighs. Alana leans forward over the table; doesn’t touch her, just takes her space, her air.

“I think they should be more than bodies,” Will says.

Alana nods.

“You’re right. They shouldn’t be reduced to a tally mark. That is something to get upset about,” her voice softens. “But even if you forget them, Will, they have families. People that they loved and who loved them. People who are going to remember them, even if you don’t. They’re not defined only by their relationship to the killer. Or to you.”

She keeps her eyes on the white arc of Alana’s throat. Thinks of how it would taste. Saltwater skin, the tattoo of blood beating against her teeth if she bit down hard enough.

“Are you trying to tell me the whole world doesn’t revolve around me?” Will asks.

Alana laughs. She takes a sip of her coffee, smiling through it. “God help us if it did.”

 

* * *

 

Lecter is wearing chocolate brown patent-leather Jimmy Choos, the kind of heels that look like they’d kill if applied correctly, a pencil skirt and matching jacket in caramel plaid, and a charmeuse blouse the colour of crushed blackberries. She looks like dessert. She sits like a crocodile, half-beneath water. Apex predator.

“I had a - I suppose you could call it a “phase”, though I was already too old for those by then - my second year of homicide,” Will says finally, breaking. Lecter gives her a reptilian look of satisfaction.

“We never become too old to develop. We all go through many transitory phases in our lives, Willow. We are not caterpillars - we build and break free from more than one chrysalis.“

“We don’t all become butterflies,” Will smiles. ”I was bringing home a different partner every night. I didn’t want to know them. Maybe I was just looking for an easy release, or a palate cleanser, or maybe I just wanted to flaunt that I wasn’t one of those girls we dragged out of the river every day. Wanted to prove I was invincible. Maybe all of those.”

She pauses, picks at the cuticle on her thumb. She does not look up but she asks, softly, “Do you find that distasteful, Dr. Lecter?”

“I don’t subscribe to a Madonna/Whore doctrine, Willow. I myself once had a reputation as something of a maneater,” Will peeks up from behind her eyelashes, sees Annabelle’s lips twitch. “And I never thought you were the blushing virgin Jack Crawford pretends you to be. I am glad you took the opportunity to explore your sexuality. Many women do not. My only regret is that you did not have a partner to appreciate exactly what you are.”

“You think they weren’t good enough for me?”

“I know they could not have been,” Annabelle says simply. She taps one pianist finger against her chin. “You said partners. Not men.”

“I did,” Will nods. “Do you find that distasteful?”

“If you truly think I could be so gauche, Willow, then I’m afraid I have failed at suitably impressing my character upon you,” Annabelle says steadily.

“No,” Will says. “I think you’ve made quite the impression.”

 

* * *

 

“Let me start with metaphor; get it out of the way,” Annabelle says. She drapes herself over Willow, dressed in glossy black feathers, her hands bracketing Willow's throat. “God did not create us in his image. Everything we are made of was taken: ribs and apples. You and I were born to be thieves, sweetheart, and we’ll keep taking from one another until it all evens out. Open up my chest, Willow, tell me what you find there, give me something to fill it up. Take my hand, Willow, or I will hold your heart in my fist until it breaks. Everything else is literal: I will find a way to get you inside of me, I’m going to feel you on my tongue, between my teeth. I will hold your heart in my fist until it breaks. I am your lover, your monster, and either way, sweet Willow, _I am going to eat you alive_.”

 

* * *

 

Alana has three brothers, and has never had any sisters. Will is not one of them. 

“I want to protect you,” Alana says plainly. “Because I think you need protecting.”

“I can take care of myself, you know,” Will argues. One of the dogs gives a low whine, and she looks at all of them, seven heads tilted in her direction, sitting still.

Alana nods, scratches behind Clarence’s ear. She’s sitting on Will’s couch while Will paces before her. It is very cold in Will’s house; Alana has not taken off her coat, or her gloves. “You’re self-sufficient, you’ve lived on your own for long periods of time and can provide for yourself, you’re educated and extremely hirable, you have experience dealing with violence and tragedy, and you carry a gun.”

The dog cries again, higher, from the mouth and not the throat. Willow rocks back on her heel. It isn’t one of hers.

“No one,” Alana continues. “Can take care of themselves alone.”

Will stops as though her winding has run out, lets herself fall inelegantly on the couch next to Alana. Their shoulders touch, and Alana does not slide away. Will does not turn to look at her as she sighs. She hears the pained cry, doesn’t know where it comes from.

“I’m not saying you’re unstable, Willow,” she says. “But are you even sure you’re awake right now?”

 

* * *

 

Will lies on top of her sheets for a long time, listening to the dog cry and cry, the shriek of the wounded. It isn't until she rolls over, thrusting her fist into her own mouth, teeth grinding on her knuckles, that the sound stops

 

* * *

 

 _Willow,_ her father had said, taking apart a rusted outboard motor, separating it into its parts on the dirt. He had placed her small hand on the tiller, propeller, skeg, naming them each in turn. His hands roughened, his face scalded by the salted wind, her hair a rat’s nest.

 _It’s important,_ he said, _to know how to take things apart if you want to put them together._

 

* * *

 

Abigail tells Will how her father taught her told hold a gun, how the metal felt warming in her hands, where amidst the ruffled fur of a stag she should aim. She talks about her father teaching her to stitch leather, to fix burst pipes, to drive a stick. She talks of her father’s voice, his hands, the pressure of his touch as he adjusted her grip on a rifle, laced his hand over hers and guided her through skinning a doe, how it felt when he sliced open her throat. 

She doesn’t speak of her mother at all.

 

* * *

 

“Of course,” Lecter nods. “For Abigail, there are only two possible answers: either her mother did not know of her father’s perversions, which means she was a blind, pathetic thing. Or she did, which makes her something weak. Complacent. Cattle. Schrodinger’s mother - Abigail will never know which is the right answer, so her mother will always be both. And neither is a woman Abigail wants to become.”

“Are you saying she lacks a strong female role model?” Will asks.

Lecter tucks her bone-straight hair over her shoulder. “Do you think that’s a role you could fill, Willow? She certainly can’t think that you’re weak. She’s seen first-hand what you’re capable of.”

 

* * *

 

WEEPING WILLOW? the headline shouts, neat tallies of black over a grainy picture of Will, one hand pressed to the roof of Beverly’s rental car in Florence, South Carolina, and the other splayed over her bowed face. _Is the Birmingham Binder Bringing FBI Specialist Willow Graham to a Breakdown?_ it prods beneath. 

Will laughs when she sees it.

“I mean really, Lounds,” she says to Annabelle. “like I haven’t been hearing that “weeping willow” line since the third grade?”

She runs a finger down the article. _Graham lives in Wolf Trap, Virginia, along with what sources report numbers up to seven dogs_. Honestly, Will thinks. It'd only be crazy if they were cats.

“Did you cry often in the third grade?” Annabelle asks.

Will turns, smile still on her face. “Ever the psychiatrist, doctor. Haven’t you heard that saying about sleeping dogs and lying?”

“I can’t turn it off either,” Annabelle reminds her. “It can’t have been easy, for a little girl. Going from shipyard to shipyard, waters to waters. Rough places full of rough men.”

“You of all people should know better than to tell me what kinds of places are no place for a lady, Annabelle,” Will says. “Do you think that explains a lot about me, then?”

“I think we’re just scratching the surface of what makes up Willow Graham,” Annabelle says. “But it must have been hard.”

“If it was,” Will says. “I didn’t know it then. It was just life.”

“It’s all just life, Willow,” Annabelle says. “Until it’s not, that is.”

 

* * *

 

“The female serial killer,” Willow says, clicking to a new slide. Aileen Wuornos’ weathered face gives a slash of a smile down at her class. “Over fifteen percent of all American serial killers have been women. It’s not a big number. It’s probably bigger than you thought.”

She pushes her glasses up her nose, doesn’t wipe her hands on her trousers. “They’re a different breed, in general, than the typical serial killer. Most of these women aren’t sexual sadists or psychopaths. We think of women as killing for more practical reasons. Black widows with big bank accounts and a trail of late husbands behind them. And they’re subtler. Less messy. Poisons. Like a suicide. Their victims are convenient - nurses smothering patients in their hospital beds, mothers drowning their own children in the bath. They’re limited by their physical capabilities - of course, the soft touch can substitute for brute force. A lot of men will get into a car if a beautiful woman asks them to. A lot of them would be willing to save a damsel in distress.”

She brings up a photo of Jeremy Olmstead, lying like a frightened porcupine with the entire contents of his toolbox pinned into him.

“The Chesapeake Ripper,” Willow says. “Is not like other women. But she is one.”

She hears the murmur rise in her class, quiets it with a sharp look directed at none of them.

“The Ripper doesn’t kill for attention or drugs or money. She’s probably independently wealthy. She isn’t low-key. She isn’t soft. Her childhood wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t that that broke her. She’s not lashing out at men for abusing her, she isn’t strangling her children because they irritate her. She doesn’t kill for sexual pleasure, but it is a certain pleasure she derives. She’s a housewife,” Will says. “Crushing cockroaches beneath her heels.”

 

* * *

 

On a Saturday, one by one the dogs silently turn their heads to stare at the door. There is a knock a few minutes later. Willow pulls an FBI jacket over her thin sleep shirt and underwear and answers.

“I apologise for the hour,” Alana says. “But I had a feeling that you would be awake.”

Will steps back to allow her in, forgets the words that mean invitation.

“I crashed your lecture,” Alana says, shrugging off her coat. Will steps forward and helps unwrap it from her arms, holds it limply in her hand before draping it over her piano. “Intriguing. As usual.”

“Did you agree with it?” Will asks.

Alana bends at the waist to pet Eugene’s back, lets him lick her hand. “I’m holding off judgment for now. I don’t think it’s implausible, though. I think women are more ready to believe other women could be serial killers. Men aren’t always aware of the danger we possess. Women know what one another are capable of.”

“Do you think I’m dangerous?” she asks Alana.

“We all have the capacity for violence. For cruelty, Will,” Alana says. She bites her lip thoughtfully. “But yes. I think you could be very dangerous indeed.”

 

* * *

 

“Anything to say to the public, Special Agent?” Freddie Lounds asks her, holding a recorder towards Will’s mouth. Her hands are very steady.

“I think you’ve said quite enough, Miss Lounds,” Will says. She reaches up to swat the recorder away and steps back instead. Lounds grins, a sharp baring of her teeth.

“No reassurances to offer, then?”

“Are you scared, Miss Lounds?” Will asks. She keeps walking, and Lounds matches her pace with long strides. It’s still cold in Danville, frost crunching beneath their feet. Somewhere in the woods around them, she can hear a dog whimpering. Will watches Lounds out of the corner of her eye, the blaze of her red hair in the wind, waits for her to say everything except the word trapped behind both their teeth: _bitch._

“Oh, I’m sure I’m completely confident in the FBI’s ability to catch a madman. Especially if they have their most special agent on the case.”

“I’m sure I’ll sleep better at night knowing you have faith in my abilities,” Will says.

“You know what they say,” Lounds shoots back, her narrow, fox-like face pinched in amusement. “It takes a thief to catch a thief. Or a lunatic, as the case may be.”

“I believe this is your stop, Miss Lounds,” Will says as they reach the yellow strip of crime scene tape. She pulls her flat badge out of her jacket, flashes it at a leo who politely lifts the tape up for her, leaving Freddie on the other side. “You can find your way back to the depths of hell from here, can’t you?”

“Be a doll and give a wave out the window when you’re up there,” Lounds says. “Madwoman in the attic: it’ll be a nice shot, I think.”

“Oh, Freddie,” Will laughs. “I wonder: if you really think me mad, why do you insist on trying to _provoke_ me?”

Freddie gives her another wide smile, like a cat with feathers sticking out of its mouth. She leans in close, and Will has to keep her eyes from closing as she inhales her peppermint breath.

“Stress-testing.”

Will turns on her heel and walks away.

Jack greets her at the front door. “Latest one’s in the attic. We think he strangled this one, like Holloway.”

Will nods. She lets Jack lead her up the stairs.

“What’s her name?” Will asks.

“What?” Jack says. He turns, at the head of the stairs, to look at her, studies her up and down. “Hardy. Alice Hardy. He left her hanging from the rafters. You got your head on straight?”

“Haven’t lost it yet,” Will reassures. She does not give herself time to take in a breath, ready herself to chart out the next dead girl, to fit the next killer inside of her. She just pushes past him, into the attic, filled with sunlight.

 

* * *

 

Annabelle feeds her: paper-thin slices of melon drizzled in honey and curling mint leaves, veal blackened in brown sugar and wine, roasted figs splitting out of their skins, curls of blood sausages made of apples and cream, soft cheeses on flaking bread, duck stewed with skin and white beans. 

“Did your mother teach you to cook?” Will asks.

Annabelle laughs.

“No,” she says. “No, I studied at a culinary school in France for several years but like all my great loves, I began by teaching myself.”

She beckons Will closer, and Will comes as though a lead has tugged taught between them. Annabelle holds a thin wooden spoon to Will’s mouth, and Will tastes whatever is in it, hot and sweet and red.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Throwing this out there and running. This is the first fic I've written in... oh, something like five years. Crossing my fingers and tentatively sticking my feet into fandom again, with 7000 odd words of unbetaed genderswap rambling nonsense nobody asked for. Most of this was written before "Trou Normand" aired, so it's a little late. There was a draft that actually had somewhat of a plot, but it is not this draft.


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